Re: complexity of scripts

 >From: Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...>
 >
 >>From: Anton Sherwood <bronto@...>
 >>
 >>I always wondered whether Chinese fantasy writers invent characters ...

        And I've always wondered how the Chinese play hangman!  :)  I
decided using chengyu (proverbs) rather than words seemed more
feasible.

 >I can't say fro absolute certain, but I very much doubt it.

        But I have heard that in Hong Kong they add kou3 (mouth) to
the left of characters in cartoons (political or otherwise) to
indicate Cantonese words that don't have standard characters for
them.

        This problem of names and characters is always interesting.
For example, Emei mountain -- location of yet another mountain temple
with associated marital arts -- is just two standard characters
pronounced "e mei" but each has the radical for mountain off to the
left.  It looks a little odd to me ('e' is 'wo3' "I" with mountain to
the left, 'mei' is 'mei2' "eyebrow" with a mountain to the left).

 >A couple of other characters I invented were for the sake of torturing a
 >student who insisted that a phonologically impossible string of letters was
 >his "English" name.  I drew this horrifying monstrosity with "turtle" on top
 >and "spirit" on bottom followed by a dreadful collection of radicals on the
 >board and informed him that this was my new "Chinese" name and I expected
 >him to use it every time he spoke to me in class.  He quicky chose Kurt.

        LOL!

        Beautiful.

--
William Annis  -  System Administrator -  Biomedical Computing Group
"When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do
towards other humans."                       Marcus Aurelius  VII.65